It seems appropriate to write about my trip to Glasgow while still hungover from the experience. In brief, my great good friend Morag McKinnon is directing a feature film, ROUNDING UP DONKEYS (there are no donkeys in it), written by my other great good friend Colin McLaren, and with my other other great good friend Stephen Murphy doing makeup duties. Stephen designed my clowns for CRY FOR BOBO, made my prosthetic uncle for INSIDE AN UNCLE, has worked on all the HARRY POTTERS and CHILDREN OF MEN and transformed Jude Law for SLEUTH.
I met Colin and his lovely partner Anita Vettesse at the home of producer and goddess Angela Murray. Stephen joined us. Absent were Morag, too frazzled from her shoot, and Fiona, who has a nasty cold.
I promised you gossip, but as ROUNDING UP DONKEYS is classified as a Film In Production, much must be shrouded in secrecy. I can tell you that the film stars that impressive chunk of Scottish beef, James Cosmo, whose career takes in both TRAINSPOTTING and BRAVEHEART (as well as voicing Thelonius the orang-utan in the mescaline nightmare known as BABE: PIG IN THE CITY) and Brian Pettifer, who appears in all three of Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis films. The movie is a follow-up of sorts to RED ROAD, but is half a comedy, which lifts (or lowers) it into a different category. The scheme is intended to produce three movies about the same small group of people, slightly like the concept of Kieslowski’s DECALOGUE, but although it works from the same set of character descriptions, Colin’s script might best be considered an alternative universe version — some characters have different careers and families and sometimes personalities.
Morag met Lars Von Trier, founder of the scheme, and asked him what to do if the story evolved in such a way that not all of the characters could be included. “Oh, just use the ones you want and have the rest ride by on a bus,” he advised. Buses being expensive and this being a modestly budgeted digital short, they are having to go on foot.
The shoot sounds pretty strenuous, with six-day weeks and 50% night shoots. Some scenes are being shot night-for-night purely for cost reasons — without enough funds to black out the windows of a church, the production was forced to shoot after nightfall. But — and I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true — it also sounds like it’s going really well. One to watch for.
‘London, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.
The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.’
Words from Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, images from Gustave Dore’s London and David Lean and Noel Coward’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER.
*
Just read that David Sherwin has been writing a script of Hamilton’s book. Genius Sherwin, who wrote Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis Trilogy, must have stacks of unproduced scripts (THE MONSTER BUTLER and THE GARDEN GNOMES BEGAN TO BLEED are but two), but I would really like to see this one come off…
Yesterday one of my students, Alex, approached, back from the hols, a scarf wound around his lower face, like Malcolm McDowell in IF… unwrapping it at last to reveal: a New Moustache, like Malcolm McDowell in IF…
As cinematic homages go, this might actually give Todd Haynes a run for his money. I think Alex has effectively already passed the year for that. As long as he doesn’t follow it up by savagely machine-gunning me to death, like Malcolm McDowell in IF…
Regular reader Darryl McCarthy contributes to our ongoing quest to pinpoint those movie moments that sugar-coat your synapses and make your insides glow like Marlene Dietrich. Another spoiler alert for this one, though I like to hope there aren’t many of you who haven’t seen Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s THE THIRD MAN.
“Moments of cinematic euphoria? The long shot with Alida Valli walking down the avenue towards the viewer and past Joseph Cotten into a future of her own design - my heart still skips a beat every time I watch it.”
It’s a truly great shot, reversing the usual spatial terms of the standard “walks off into the sunset” ending by having (Alida) Valli walk TOWARDS and PAST us, rather than away, and leaving the hero stranded, stationary, abandoned by love to the solitary pleasure of the philosophical cigarette.
I noted before how the falling leaves were a last-minute improvisation (men up ladders with sacks of fallen greenery [or should that be orangery, given the autumnal climate?]). and it is also perhaps worth noting that the antique Eclair camera deployed to shoot the scene did not even allow the cinematographer to watch through the viewfinder as Valli proceeded from the vanishing point to the lens.
“If we run the end titles [over this] you’ll soon know who stayed to watch the end of the fucking picture, won’t you?” remarked Reed. (Facts & quotes from Charles Drazin’s In Search of The Third Man).
It’s a bittersweet sort of euphoria, but sometimes that’s just what you want. I visited Vienna with Fiona one winter and found the place much like that, and we went on the Big Wheel, Fiona lying on the floor in terror as I admired the view (but got nervous as the carriage creaked and the windows rattled).
Why did Reed make so few great films? Lindsay Anderson bemoans that the great Brit “fell in with Americans”, while David Lean observed that “Carol lost his courage.” The suggestion was that if he had made this film later in his life, Reed would have broken up this sublime master shot with cutaways.
Is there even more to be said about this film, which has already been the subject of entire books and documentaries? There certainly is…
Stills from THE FINAL PROGRAMME, an amazing pop-sci-fi sextravaganza scripted, directed and designed by the enormous Robert Fuest. Here we see dashing, pill-popping Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Jerry Cornelius (bottom) played by Jon Finch (who deserves rediscovery for being sexy and brilliant here) in search of mad scientists Graham Crowden (also to be seen maddening up Lindsay Anderson’s Mick Travis trilogy), Basil Henson and George Coulouris (the only member of the cast in CITIZEN KANE who aged something like his character. More on Prophetic Cinema, and the noble Mr. Crowden, soon).
For a while Fuest was a bright-yet-unrecognised light of British Cinema, but he had the bad luck to come along during the collapse in American funding at the start of the seventies. Initially encouraged, then royally shafted, by what Michael Reeves called “those ponces at A.I.P.”, Fuest combined eye-popping visual flair, a traditionally English love for the eccentric and unruly, and a gleeful sadism. In other words, he was a Michael Powell for the rock ‘n’ roll era.
While Michael Reeves was destroyed by depression, recreational drugs, and psychiatry, Fuest was trashed by the film business itself: THE DEVIL’S RAIN was ludicrously recut by the A.I.P. and the industry in the U.K. imploded, leaving Fuest to mostly stifle in TV work, with only one other feature credit in 1982, an intriguing-sounding softcore drama, APHRODITE.
But before that happened, we get not only the above movie, on which more later, but also the two DR PHIBES comedy-horrors with Vincent Price (a third, PHIBES TRIUMPHANT, was stymied by Fuest’s inability to come up with any more elaborately nasty murders), a sombre, skilled and stylish WUTHERING HEIGHTS, and this location-set, brightly daylit psycho-thriller, AND SOON THE DARKNESS (an odd debut for a former production designer since it requires no sets!):
I like the whispery female VO that comes in partway thru, as if someone’s been watching Godard…
Wondrous scene from BACHELOR FLAT, directed by Frank Tashlin. I’ve read it described as the ultimate in widescreen composition – a sausage dog dragging a dinosaur bone along a beach — which is funny, and true, but what I also dig is the way Tashlin extends the sequence: the concept is funny from every angle, so he must show it from every angle (restraining himself from going overhead or shooting from below through a glass ceiling a la THE LODGER). The exhaustive variations remind me of Shimura’s walk through the forest in RASHOMON. I bet if you swapped the scores of both sequences around they’d still work pretty good too.
Tashlin was a strip cartoonist and animator in the world of Bugs Bunny etc, the only animation director from that school to break into live-action features (cartoon directors were, and probably still are, barred from the Director’s Guild), which he did by way of gag-writing and screen-writing (he wrote the classic “What are you doing? Holding the wall up?” gag for Harpo in A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA). His best stuff shows how gag sequences can be far more than decoration, they can be the very architecture of a comedy script, as in Chaplin and Keaton. We swallow the story painlessly without even realising it’s being fed to us and the entertainment never has to stop to set up the next story point.
Tash is close to unique for the way he adapted cartoon language to live action, with wild distortions, impossible exaggerations, breaking the fourth wall, and semi-vulgar sexual hyperbole that relates to Tex Avery’s super-voluptuous Red Riding Hood toons.
Tash has a certain kind of satirist’s ability to celebrate and excoriate at the same time. He finds Jayne Mansfield grotesque (”Can you imagine THAT in marble?”), as the milk bottles gag makes clear (Jean-Pierre Melville said the American ideal of beauty was “two buttocks in a brassiere) but he also renders her stylised movements lovingly and celebrates the power she has over male bystanders. It’s a little like Tati’s odd relationship with the modern age: he recreates it at its most compelling and beautiful in order to bemoan its very existence.
(Above: Jerry Lewis on Frank Tashlin)
Tashlin made a whole sackful of Jerry Lewis films, from the best Martin & Lewis film, ARTISTS AND MODELS (it’s not easy finding a good romantic interest for Jerry, but Shirley MacLaine can do anything, plus she looks cute in a Catgirl costume), thru the LAST Martin & Lewis film, HOLLYWOOD OR BUST, where the two stars wouldn’t even speak to each other (”It was a bitch,”), and on to numerous Lewis solo projects, most of which have great bits, but which aren’t actually the strongest work from either man. Lewis’ need for freedom to improvise kept Tashlin from experimenting with interesting shots, though Lewis was obviously taking notes: he adapts Tashlin’s crazily lurid colour schemes to his own work, to notable effect in THE NUTTY PROFESSOR and THE LADIES’ MAN especially.
Away from Lewis, Tashlin was liberated to paint demented distorting-mirror pictures of America in the fifties/early sixties, and his two Jayne Mansfield films brim over with Loony Tunes logic, satiric spleen and lush, candycoloured imagery. Here’s what Lindsay Anderson had to say about THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT:
“Cheaply prefabricated and carelessly assembled, The Girl Can’t Help It is a juke-box thrown into the face of the public with a great blare of ugly, debilitating music. Seeing it is like being shut up for a couple of hours insideone of those huge, booming machines, all pink, green and mauve lights, gobbling up the small change of the ignorant. I suppose that Jayne Mansfield, ‘launched’ in this film, is human: but she so resembles a strip-cartoon parody of the Monroe-Dors figure that she might very well have been fashioned out of some disturbing new plastic substance. The ‘comedy’ is provided chiefly by Tom Ewell and Edmond O’Brien: two desperate, disillusioned performances, whose scenes have the fragrance of stale cigarette smoke and whisky bottles all but emptied.”
Wow! Although clearly Anderson hates the film and I love it, he’s certainly gotten inside it and had a look around: his description is recognisable to anyone who’s seen the film. The only problem is that he approached the film wanting to be sympathetically introduced to rock ‘n’ roll, the better to understand it, and Tashlin isn’t making that movie.
“I love the artist’s use of the colour blue,” — Barry Lyndon.
But Tashlin DOES allow us to hear the music, uninterrupted, and creates images with Deluxe colour supremo Leon Shamroy that have dazzled many a filmmaker before me. John Waters says he’s always wanted to achieve the blue in the above clip. With digital grading it might now be possible to sample the exact hue direct from Tashlin’s film, but without the coloured dress to make it POP, you won’t get the effect. Complimentary colour theory is the filmmaker’s friend.
This film also offers Julie London as a drunken hallucination, singing Cry Me a River in a variety of pastel gowns, appearing in every room Tom Ewell runs to, effectively hounding just him like Tex Avery’s Droopy: “I do this to him all through the movie.”
WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER? is even wilder, opening with Tony Randall as a one-man-band playing the 20th Century Fox fanfare (fulfilling Tashlin’s ambition to get a laugh before the film has even begin), followed by a flurry of loud, disastrous commercials presented by desperate Hanna-Barbera-type caricature actors. Mansfield truly leaves the human race behind in this one, as a one-note celebrity grotesque (with a poodle called Shamroy - Tashlin can’t resist in-jokes, or jokes of any kind).
Tashlin is a rewarding auteur partly because even his worst films usually have mind-blowing moments of characteristic flamboyance and invention. THE ALPHABET MURDERS is mostly awful rubbish, a strained parody of something Tashlin evidently isn’t too familiar with, the Agatha Christie mystery (he took over direction from Seth Holt shortly before shooting began, with Tony Randall taking Zero Mostel’s place as star), but a few scenes give joy. One, a simple conversational two-hander, can induce schizoid embolisms in the unwary. As Randall and Robert Morley converse, a shaving mirror stands between them. In Randall’s shots, his mouth is eclipsed by the mirror, which reflects back Morley’s, lips enlarged to fill the place that should be occupied by Randall’s. In Morley’s shots, Randall’s lips replace his. It should be easy enough to follow, but as Tashlin consistently shows the speaking mouth and listening eyes, our brains shallow-fry themselves trying to follow what the hell’s going on, until the soundtrack is drowned out by the steam shrieking from our ears.
Tashlin re-creates the world afresh for us, which is what I love most about him. Maybe I’ll blog later on about what that means for me, and the filmmakers who do it most effectively.
My first encounter with Tashlin’s work illustrates the idea somewhat. I was a kid, watching Sunday afternoon films with my granny. I liked Bob Hope. SON OF PALEFACE came on. Tashlin had written THE PALEFACE, which has a great ending plus Jane Russell. After he’d helmed reshoots on THE LEMON DROP KID for Hope, Hope gave Tashlin the job of writing and directing this sequel.
The scene: Hope is driving his jalopy across the prairie, pursued by rampaging, un-P.C. injuns. The front wheel comes off the car. Roy Rogers, helpfully to hand on horseback, lassoos the spare spoke and holds the car up. But somebody needs to grab the wheel, now trundling off into the cactus-filled middle distance. R.R. hands Hope the rope and rides off in pursuit, leaving Hope holding the front end of his car up FROM INSIDE IT. Bob yells after Roy, “Hurry up, this is impossible!”
At which point, whole vistas of impossibility opened up. The concept of The Impossible as something that can only be done for short periods; the concept that you can explode the reality of a film without anybody minding and carry on as if nothing had happened; the concept that you can call attention to the impossibility of something, thereby forestalling the audience’s disbelief; the concept that said disbelief can be suspended, by a rope, from the inside…
With the new ST TRINIANS movie due in British cinemas on the 21st, and an article on British writer-producer-directors Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat due from me immanently, I decided to watch three of the original films last night. Having seen the original BELLES OF ST TRINIANS a few years back, I decided to jump straight into the sequels, omitting only the last, WILDCATS OF ST TRINIANS, because it is a dreadful thing and anyway I don’t have a copy.
British comedy series are an odd lot, often functioning on inertia and raw acting talent rather than anything resembling good material, and yet they inspire tremendous warmth and attachment in the public here. Take the CARRY ON films — arguably three of them are consistently entertaining, out of a total of twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.
Twenty-nine films on the theme of sexual frustration, filled with closeted gay men, hefty spinsters, and sex-obsessed nitwits apparently suffering from what Schrader and Scorsese (who, presumably, know all about it) call D.S.B. (Deadly Sperm Back-up, where the unused sperm backs up to the brain and induces idiocy).
Then there are the lesser-known DOCTOR films, which made a star of Dirk Bogarde and thus prepared the way for DEATH IN VENICE and THE NIGHT PORTER, and managed to carry on for several entries even after their star had graduated to working with Basil Dearden and Joseph Losey. That’s a common trait of these series, they outlive their stars, their creators, their reasons for existing in the first place…
Such as the CONFESSIONS movies, inaugurated by British film legend Val Guest, who had been working since the thirties and earlier brought us the excellent Hammer cop thriller HELL IS A CITY. Here he took the saucy comedy format into the seventies, where suddenly you could actually SHOW full nudity and intercourse, so he did. He complained later that if these films had been subtitled they’d have been acclaimed as arthouse smashes… but aside from Verhoeven’s TURKISH DELIGHT I can’t think of any “art film” they resemble. Actually, CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER is like the Verhoeven movie with all the serious bits removed, and yet it still manages to be more ugly and depressing.
The fact that that film’s star, Robin Askwith, was cast in BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (and he’s very good in it) probably accounts for a decent percentage of the rotten reviews BH garnered on release: sheer guilt-by-association.
Anyhow, back to our rampaging schoolgirls. The first St Trins film is based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle, which are in turn derived from stories Searle heard about the real St Trinnean’s, a “progressive” boarding school right here in Edinburgh where the girls were allowed to run wild as nature intended. (Hey, listen, another Edinburgh girls’ school inspired the source material of William Wyler’s THESE THREE and THE CHILDREN’S HOUR!)
Edinburgh connection 2: that superb eccentric actor Alastair Sim stars in the first film and cameos in the second, dragging up to play Miss Fitton, the dithering, corruptible headmistress, as well as her ne’er-do-well brother. Here we see the British love of drag combined with that fondness for multiple role-playing later developed in DR. STRANGELOVE and O LUCKY MAN!
(Sim’s very best work for Launder and Gilliat is in the marvellous GREEN FOR DANGER, available now from Criterion).
Sim declined to be confined to a film series, and so the later films import a succession of star comedians in a vain attempt to replace him. First into the breach is Terry-Thomas, who obviously I’m a fan of, and if BLUE MURDER AT ST TRINIANS used him more thoroughly, things might have gone better. But all the sequels seem to divide their energies and plotlines to damaging effect, and the rot sets in right here. Although hearing T-T say things like “That’s a bit adjacent, isn’t it?” is never less that a pleasure, there isn’t enough rigour in integrating him into a storyline that needs him.
Stars from the first film are back, notably Joyce Grenfell, whose entrance in the first film had established her as a brilliant film comedian and a sympathetic presence. Curiously, Launder and Gilliat seem to have fixed on the idea of mistreating her character, goody-two-shoes Police Constable Ruby Gates, as their main approach to her character. In the first film the abuse all comes from the rampaging schoolkids, which makes sense, but her two sequels tend to separate her off into unproductive sidetracks.
Better use is made of George Cole, a younger actor mentored by Sim, who appears in four of the films as Flash Harry, an archetypal fifties “spiv” character (basically, a Cockney black marketeer, a sort of Teddy Boy version of Harry Lime) who for some reason became the series’ only essential figure (he’s back in the new version, portrayed by comedian and sex god Russell Brand). Cole is very zestful, firing off malapropisms at speed (’I don’t want to appear inhospital,’ and ‘Greek Archie-pelly-logo’) but the best thing about the character is his theme tune, a pub piano leitmotif which strikes up with mechanical regularity whenever Harry takes more than a couple of steps, like a proletarian James Bond theme. This, and the jaunty St Trinians theme itself, are the work of Sir Malcolm Arnold, best-known for arranging the Colonel Bogey March for BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI.
BLUE MURDER takes the girls to Rome, where the sixth form all aim to marry an Italian prince, and the filmmakers blagged permission to shoot in the Forum and Colisseum on the grounds that they were making a “cultural documentary”.
PURE HELL AT ST TRINIANS does not take place at the school at all, it having been arsoned to oblivion, and again transports the riotous kids abroad, with the sixth form abducted into a Sheikh’s harem. One of the very strange things about the series, and about British culture generally, is the mainstream media’s use of school uniforms as fetishwear, while our moral guardians shriek about pedophiles hiding in the shrubbery. The St Trinians films mine this imagery while serving up slapstick comedy for little kids — it’s quite disturbing, or almost.
This movie includes Cecil Parker as guest star, but for some reason he’s insufficiently larger-than-life to really hold it all together. He’s perfectly good, but to see him really shine it’s better to check out his work in Gilliat’s THE CONSTANT HUSBAND, where he’s a sports-obsessed psychiatrist treating an amnesiac bigamist… The other strongest element in PURE HELL is Irene Handl, an adored character actor who can be seen to great effect in MORGAN and THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. Here she’s a teacher with a background in lunatic asylums. “Soon I may be the only one around here with a certificate proving my sanity!”
With THE GREAT ST TRINIANS TRAIN ROBBERY in 1966 the series shunted into Technicolor and adopted comic Frankie Howerd as a hairdresser-turned-trainrobber. It’s a very very colourful film indeed, which proves to be a Bad Thing, and Howerd is again underused. Really Howerd isn’t a team player: he mugs and scene-steals atrociously, but the best response to this is to encourage it, since he’s so good, yet Launder seems determined to integrate Howerd into an unpromising ensemble.
Howerd’s best film scenes are usually his big public speeches: he got a great one at the start of CARRY ON DOCTOR, but there’s nothing like that here, so he mainly entertains just by presenting his impossibly large, pendulous face to the camera and squinting evilly.
TRAIN ROBBERY features a few half-hearted nods to sixties fashions, music, crime, and film-making: the speeded-up chase sequence maybe owes something to Richard Lester, but as it’s conducted back and forth over the same hundred feet of track about fifty times, it doesn’t really generate any pace and the gags are unimaginative. There’s no Joyce Grenfell in this one and the series still neglects to develop any of the schoolgirls themselves as proper characters, which is odd, really.
But there was worse to come. Described by my screenwriting friend Colin McLaren as the “you-can-see-it-going-in, hard porn version”, WILDCATS OF ST TRINIANS ups the raunch factor enough to make it a queasy experience, although Colin does exaggerate the penetrative aspect considerably. But there’s a line in the sand, or should be, between the mild seaside postcard comedy of the first films and the naked schoolgirls served up in this travesty, which actually came out in 1980, after British smut had basically rolled over and died at the box office anyway. It’s the equivalent of CARRY ON EMMANUELLE, a depressing extension of a fundamentally innocent series into more explicit territory.
I need to wash that memory away with some good old-fashioned British toilet humour:
The great Dudley Sutton (who was in my first short film).
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FILM | Tagged: Angela Murray, Anita Vettesse, Babe: Pig in the City, Braveheart, Brian Pettifer, Colin McLaren, James Cosmo, Kate Dickie, Lindsay Anderson, Morag McKinnon, Rounding Up Donkeys, Stephen Murphy, Tony Curran, Trainspotting | 
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